thu 03/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Royal Opera

Peter Quantrill

"No heckling. No smoking. No making love," read the nifty video projections announcing the rise of the new Mahagonny at the Royal Opera House. Why so coy? Could they not give us a bang for our buck, or even a slow comfortable screw?

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Alice in Wonderland, BBCSO, Brönnimann, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan

The Southbank Centre’s Women of the World Festival may have been the largest cultural event marking International Women’s Day 2015, but it wasn’t the most ambitious. Over at the Barbican two women were responsible for a multimedia opera staging whose spectacle, level of detail and sheer force of personnel involved was staggering.

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Ruddigore, Charles Court Opera, King's Head Theatre

David Nice

How can a feisty village dame duetting “lackaday”s with the mounted head of a long-lost, nay, long-dead love be so deuced affecting? Ascribe it partly to the carefully-applied sentiment of Gilbert and Sullivan, slipping in a very singular 11-o’clock number after so much Gothick spoofery, partly to two consummate and subtle singing actors, Amy J Payne and John Savournin, in a production of spare ingenuity by the latter, true Renaissance/Victorian man equally at home in opera and operetta.

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Le Roi de Lahore, Chelsea Opera Group, QEH

David Nice

Now that opera houses mostly lack either the will or the funds to stage the more fantastical/exotic pageants among 19th century operas – the Royal Opera production of Meyerbeer’s mostly third-rate Robert le Diable was an unhappy exception – it’s left to valiant concert-performance companies like Chelsea Opera Group to try and trail clouds of kitschy glory.

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Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera

David Nice

Mozart’s The Magic Flute is one of those operas, like Verdi’s Il trovatore and all the mature Wagner masterpieces, which need a line-up of equally fine singers but rarely get it in the compromised world of the opera house.

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The Indian Queen, English National Opera

Kimon Daltas

When Purcell died at just 36, he left The Indian Queen unfinished, which only adds to the usual problems of staging his "semi-operas" – plays with musical interludes which don’t really accord with modern operatic tastes, despite the ravishing beauty of the music itself.

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Hansel and Gretel, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh

After 16 years one might expect a revival of a repertory opera like Hansel and Gretel to come up with a dusty look and frayed edges. But Benjamin Davis has done a brilliant job pumping the life back into Richard Jones’s memorable but intricate 1998 staging of Humperdinck’s pocket Wagnerian masterpiece.

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Farinelli and the King, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

alexandra Coghlan

Farinelli and The King is pretty much a perfect piece of theatre. More importantly, though, it’s perfectly timed. In a month when English National Opera’s troubles have made the front page, when op-eds are all about why Simon Rattle’s dreams of a new concert hall for London are fruitless, this paean to music – to its serious, healing, transformative power – is not only resonant, but necessary.

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La Vida Breve/Gianni Schicchi, Opera North

graham Rickson

The good news first: director Christopher Alden’s new production of Gianni Schicchi is quite brilliant, and one of the funniest, cleverest things you’ll see in an opera house. Puccini’s taut one-acter is difficult to mess up, but it takes some skill to present it this well. Alden’s version is full of pleasures. Like Rhys Gannon’s stroppy young Gheradino, who spends most of the action wearing headphones and playing on an iPad.

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The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, English National Opera

David Nice

After seven glorious Welsh National Opera performances in the summer of 2010, it looked like curtains for Richard Jones’s Mastersingers (or Meistersinger, as it then was, sung in German): no DVD, no co-productions. The director seemed happy with that, as philosophical as Wagner's operatic characterisation of 16th-century cobbler-mastersinger Hans Sachs.

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